GamerScore League and November anticipation

This evening I have found myself in that position that all students love to find themselves. After spending around ninety minutes this after college today working on some practice exam questions for biology tomorrow, all of my coursework is currently up-to-date. Biology, in particular, is going really well so far. I have gotten an A grade in both of my end of unit tests, and I’m hoping that I’ll find out the result of my third test, which was on mitosis, tomorrow morning during class. I felt this test went quite well and I know for certain that, thanks to YouTube, I’ll never be able to forget the process of mitosis. Not a bad thing for exams of course, but tomorrow we’ll see if having the mitosis song stuck in my head for the last two weeks has actually paid off. I hope so!

You may have seen me tweeting about the X360A GamerScore League over the last few weeks. We have just passed the halfway point in this competition. This is my second time participating since joining the site back in early 2009. My first time was later that year, when I was part of the winning team, accumulating just over 110,000 gamerscore during the eight weeks of the competition. This time around I didn’t want the pressure of joining a team hoping to challenge for top spot. Joining three other like-minded members we came together to form the team ‘Casually Motivated’. Our aim was to just find ourselves a comfortable spot in the standings and have fun. We’re sitting nicely in 11th place tonight as I write this. I’m more than happy with this given the incredible scores some of the teams are putting up.

So far I’ve used the GSL as motivation to finally catch up on the Halo series ahead of the release of Halo 4 next month. I can currently be found having a generous helping of fun playing Halo Reach multiplayer. I’ve never really given Halo’s multiplayer much attention before, but I feel Reach’s multiplayer will do a good job of keeping me occupied until Halo 4 hits the shelves. I’d also like to dust off my copy of Metro 2033 in the coming weeks along with a couple of other games that have been left unloved on the shelf for various lengths of time. My target before the GSL started was to earn 6,000 gamerscore. Truthfully, I’d be happy with 3,000 now.

The moment October fades into the past and draws the GSL to a close my attention will turn to National Novel Writing Month, and my first attempt at writing fiction since my days as a year 9 student nearly ten years ago. I’m really excited to be giving this a go. I’d love to reach the 50,000 word target, and will certainly be setting my sights on doing so. I’m hoping that getting involved with this and doing my A Level work will drive away my sometimes overwhelming urge to procrastinate. I’m also looking forward to using the experience, along with tips and help from my fellow November novelists to work on and develop my writing style.

Now I just need to take a scoop of the jumble of ideas in my head and see if I can work them into a foundation that can hold together well enough for a 50,000 word novel. At the moment I’m leaning towards a Medieval story, but I’ve always been a terrible decision maker, so only time will tell.